One of the striking features of the last few years has been a re-awakening of interest in spirituality. Many new books on prayer have appeared, old classics of the spiritual life have been re-published, prayer groups have sprung up and the Charismatic Movement has become an important factor in many Christian communities. If the 1960s was the decade of secularism and ‘God is dead’, the 1970s may well go down in history as the decade of renascent spirituality. But this interest in spirituality has not, in general, gone hand in hand with a renewed interest in theology: indeed, in many cases I detect a positive hostility towards professional theologians (perhaps this is simply the latest exemplification of that separation of ascetical and mystical theology from dogmatics which has existed in Western Christianity since the Middle Ages). Still less has there been any link between this concern with spirituality and philosophy. And yet there are many important philosophical problems here: given that in a spiritual way of life men have certain experiences and are changed in various ways, what does this show?

Faced with the problem of evil, theistic philosophers, in their endeavour to show that religious belief is coherent and tenable, usually produce an argument running along the following lines: The presence of evil in the world is justified by the fact that some evils are positively required for the achievement of a certain good (or, perhaps, certain goods) which God wants to achieve; and this good is of such great value as to make the evils which we encounter well worth enduring. Since, then (so the argument goes), the evils of this world are necessary conditions for the attainment of much greater good, God is justifed in permitting their occurrence.

One of the most peculiar features of the belief in God is the accompanying claim that God is an indescribable mystery, an object of faith but never an object of knowledge. In certain contexts – in worship, for example – this claim undoubtedly serves a useful purpose; and so I do not want to dismiss the idea altogether. But when pious remarks about the ineffable nature of God are taken out of context and turned into philosophy, the result is usually an epistemological muddle. The trouble, of course, is that those who insist on God's mysteriousness still manage to say all sorts of things about him; he is an incorporeal spirit, he created the world, he loves his creatures, and so on. To assert these things is to presume some understanding of God, but no understanding is possible if God is completely incomprehensible. So if that is how it is, if the object of religious belief is utterly incomprehensible, then it makes no sense to say – or believe – anything about God.

Despite years of philosophical preoccupation with language, figurative discourse remains a sadly neglected topic. Biblical scholars and theologians still make use of a rag–bag of terms such as myth, metaphor, image, allegory, and analogy according to their own lights, with little or no help from philosophers in distinguishing or relating the categories involved. Too often these terms are used as equivalents.

Among Western scholars there has been a growing interest in Buddhist philosophy, especially in the philosophical teachings of the Mādhyamika. Mādhyamika philosophy is considered to be ‘the most important outcome of Buddha's teaching’ and to represent ‘philosophical Buddhism par excellence’. The main message of Mādhyamika Buddhism is the doctrine of emptiness. Yet scholars, as well as students of Buddhism, have often been puzzled about this teaching and have misinterpreted it. The chief purpose of this paper is to expound the Mādhyamika philosophy of emptiness as presented in Chinese San–lun sources and to clarify misconceptions about this important philosophy of Buddhism.

To say ‘mysticism versus philosophy’ in the context of Islamic civilization means something far different from what it has come to signify in the West, where many philosophers have looked upon mysticism as the abandonment of any attempt to reconcile religious data with intelligent thought. Certainly the Muslim mystics and philosophers sometimes display a certain mutual opposition and antagonism, but never does their relationship even approach incompatibility.

In two recent articles Grace M. (Dyck) Jantzen has argued that an embodied God could be both a being worthy of worship (in the Judaeo-Christian tradition) and omnipresent. In arguing for neither of these claims has she attempted to prove that God (if he exists) is embodied, or even that God (if he exists) must be embodied. Rather, she has urged acceptance of the more modest claim there is no good reason for denying the possible embodiment of God (if he exists) on grounds either connected with his being a worthy object of worship or in terms of a supposed entailment of incorporeality on God's omnipresence. Yet contemporary thinkers with as radically divergent views about God as Kai Nielsen and Father Copleston forward ‘the argument that an embodied God is inadequate for sophisticated theism’; and, Jantzen avers, there is a ‘widespread belief that if God is indeed omnipresent, as we are clearly taught in Scripture, then that doctrine of omnipresence entails immediately that God must be incorporeal’. The purpose of my remarks in this note is not to dispute Jantzen's conclusions, but to question the strength and/or satisfactoriness of some of her arguments for those conclusions. Perhaps the most pervading misgiving arises over her unquestioned equating of ‘embodiment’ with ‘having a body’. Surely at first blush such synonymy appears both obvious and innocuous. But where the notion of embodiment itself is the crux of the issue, careful reflection needs to be given to just what the notion involves. Yet she simply accepts the synonymy ‘without any further ado, as though it were just obviously true’, just as she accuses Findlay of doing regarding ‘the claim that only a being who exists necessarily would be worthy of our worship’.